The cost of getting IT recruitment wrong…

Hands up all those who have hired a dud? Yup, thought so. I’ve got my hand up as well. How about those who have made a duff career move? I see that quite a few of you have a hand up again.

Human nature being what it is, no matter how robust and professional we think our recruitment processes are, we all make mistakes. That great career move that you thought would transform your personal fortunes turns out to be the Highway to Hell (and, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions). The Enterprise Architect that you thought would lead your team to new glories turned out to have been less than honest on his CV. The Test Manager who said she had that particular skill you really need, watched a webinar on it five years ago and is as much use as the proverbial chocolate teapot.

When you hire the wrong person it hurts your business, and it doesn’t do that person much good either. Part of the problem, I think, is that too many line managers inside a business, especially those who only have to hire sporadically, think that recruitment is easy and don’t understand why their internal or external recruiters can’t find candidates at the drop of a hat. “Just stick an advert on S1, everyone looks there, don’t they?” sort of sums up the approach of the occasional recruiter. Well, actually, not everyone looks on S1, and techies in particular frequent other job boards or, more commonly, shun them altogether and can only be found by a combination of the tracking skills of a Kalahari bushman and a yet-to-be-developed recruitment super-algorithm.

It’s not just line managers who are misinformed: research by the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) suggests that one third of HR decision makers who have hired the wrong person think it costs their business nothing and 20% of HR decision makers don’t know what it costs.

That’s why we’re in business. We know that internal recruiters baulk at paying fees to recruitment agencies, but the reality is that the good agencies (Be-IT for example, but there are several others) actually are very cost effective, especially compared to the price of getting it wrong. And just to prove that point, the REC has done some sums that explain just how much a dud actually costs your company. As the schematic below shows, based on someone joining you on a salary of £42K, the actual cost to your company of recruiting the wrong person is actually £132K. You can recruit quite a lot of people for £132,000.

Source: REC

This sum is made up of a combination of various elements, from the cost of training to the damage caused by loss of productivity and the waste of money resulting from increased staff turnover as others flee the scene.

Now I know that some people reading this will say, “well, you’re a recruitment consultancy, so of course you would say that…” and they would be right, but, and it’s quite an important but, that doesn’t make it wrong. If more people put as much effort into getting the right candidate then they would have far fewer instances where they had to spend money to get rid of the wrong ones!